The air power use discourse and Operation Sindoor
Whenever nations embark on reconfiguring their security strategies, they must invariably review the use of the various instruments of force that are available for exploitation. India's journey down that road has been evolutionary rather than transformational. From a rather diffident power soon after Independence, that perceived the instrument of force as an 'avoidable necessity', to more assertive expressions of national power over the last five decades, that commenced with the 1971 war with Pakistan, Indian statecraft stands at the crossroads of a new era.
The 'new normal'
Operation Sindoor (May 7-10) may well have redrawn the contours of India's unwritten national security strategy. Here, at its centre, is a more assertive and proactive strategy that is now willing to explore 'prevention, pre-emption and punishment' as the new normal against Pakistan, should it continue to support terrorism against India as an instrument of the Pakistani state. However, what will hopefully remain as the inviolable edifice of this strategy will be the continuation of 'responsibility and restraint' (the hallmark of any response that the Indian state has offered whenever faced with a national security crisis).
In the past, an excessively continental mindset, a preoccupation with attrition warfare along long and contested borders, and the linkages between conventional operations and territory as a currency of military effectiveness, ensured that land forces, both military and paramilitary, occupied pole position in India's national security calculus. The widespread prevalence of internal armed conflict added to the inescapable necessity for this orientation.
The reemergence of the maritime domain and its attractiveness to double-bank as an instrument of force and diplomacy lifted the blinkers off centuries of sea-blindness and offered options other than a continental mindset to India's national security planners. However, all was not well when it came to understanding the competitive advantage that air power offered apex policymakers when confronting the dilemmas of climbing the escalation ladder vis-à-vis unpredictable adversaries such as Pakistan and matching the capabilities of China (which now appears to have significantly widened the conventional gap with India in all realms of military power, especially air power).
Air power use and what has changed
It is in this context that the recent offensive-defensive employment of air power in Operation Sindoor paves the way for a more nuanced understanding of the importance of military air power in the national security calculus. For over a decade now, the non-kinetic capability of the Indian Air Force (IAF) has matched the best in the world in areas such as tactical and strategic airlift, and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations. It is in the offensive realm that the IAF, over the last decade or so, has been attempting to impress upon the strategic establishment that it has the capabilities and the will to act as the first responder and cause significant attrition to an adversary in several new configurations of warfare that are proliferating across the globe.
Until Operation Sindoor, offensive air power was considered by a conservative and diffident strategic establishment in India as an escalatory instrument that fitted only into the calculus of conventional military operations. Even though the IAF doctrine of 2012 articulated the mission requirements of sub-conventional conflict that include counter-terrorist operations, it mainly remained in the realm of discussion in war colleges till the Narendra Modi government decided to use offensive air power at Balakot (in 2019). The IAF, however, remained doctrinally persistent when it continued to push for greater involvement in limited conflict and no-war-no-peace situations in its latest doctrine.
In an era of a serious budgetary squeeze, the past few years have seen fierce competition between the three services (the Indian Army, Indian Navy and IAF) for a share of the defence budget, a situation that has also resulted in dissonance in crafting the optimal military strategy against collusive adversaries with the available instruments. In this milieu, the IAF has been a laggard in educating and convincing policymakers that offensive air power offers immense potential in waging non-contact warfare and can impose serious costs on adversaries in several contingencies without needlessly committing boots on ground.
What the discourse should be
Notwithstanding the success of offensive air power and integrated air defence operations during Operation Sindoor, the four-day conflict cannot serve as a standard template for imposing costs on Pakistan, or on inflicting unacceptable attrition on other adversaries in limited conflict scenarios.
However, what it certainly does is to grant the IAF an equal role in multi-domain operations. The discourse must not be about air power displacing land or maritime power as the pre-eminent instrument in the prevailing complex security environment that India finds itself in. It must be more about what air power can bring to the integrated battle to force decisive strategic outcomes.
Based on the Prime Minister's recent articulation on India's reduced threshold to accept pain, and if its response mechanisms gravitate more towards prevention, pre-emption and punishment strategies, it is a no-brainer that offensive air operations delivered at the tactical and operational levels that produce strategic outcomes will become the Indian military's first responder. Concurrently, a robust and integrated air defence ecosystem that can absorb a peer adversary's natural retaliatory response, will be a significant force multiplier.
With its current capital budgetary allocation to build robust air power capability at very modest levels, the biggest challenge for the IAF is to build the capability to focus on collusive threats that are morphing in the neighbourhood such as the imminent delivery of fifth generation fighter aircraft (the J-35 by China) to the Pakistan Air Force.
The IAF has much catching up to do with government support if it is to fulfil the potential it demonstrated during Operation Sindoor.
Arjun Subramaniam is a retired Air Vice Marshal from the Indian Air Force and an air power strategist
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